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#mailgun

1 post1 participant0 posts today

Speaking of #EuropeanAlternatives, is there any for #TransactionalMail ? Not email providers, not newsletter providers, but those third parties that offer you a mail server to send email notifications and etc from your website.

In my case, it's for #Discourse instances. I'm still using #Mailgun which, well, may or maybe not count as European given its owner #Sinch, but also I'd like to migrate to a more fair and social option if possible (also not to just a brand cover with AWS underneath).

This #GoToSocial account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform #Ghost (and troubleshoot issues) 😆

If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag #EleSelfHostsGhost so you can just mute it.

I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:
✅ I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS
✅ I imported all the old posts and media: https://news.elenarossini.com
✅ I installed #Apache to use #Varnish cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS
✅ I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/ Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)

So far so good.

👹 but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, #Mailgun immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account 😱

It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.

Now, why am I sharing all this?

In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:

https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6

And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.

I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.

Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.

Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation ❤️

Elena RossiniElena Rossini
More from Elena Rossini ⁂
Continued thread

I attempted today to change my email address on #MailGun.com, and wooh boy, it did not go well. This isn't nearly going to fit in one post, so buckle up.
When I logged in, the site informed me that it was going to convert my MailGun login to a "Sinch ID" (MailGun was acquired by Sinch a few years ago). I was not given a choice about skipping this conversion. It seemed to go fine. (continued) #ChangeOfAddress 🧵

Fucking #Comcast is (again) bouncing emails from my family mail server with no explanation of why or what to do about it. Just "554 server not available".
There is no legitimate reason to bounce emails from my server. I do _everything_ correctly (incl. #DKIM and p=reject #DMARC) and my server has been in continuous operation for over a decade.
Comcast is the worst, but, they're not the only one pulling this crap.
Yet another domain I have to route through #MailGun. *sigh*
#smtp #sysadmin